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Childhood
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DOI: 10.1177/0907568214549080
published online 11 September 2014Childhood
Hanne Haavind, Barrie Thorne, Wendy Hollway and Eva Magnusson
experiences of subordination and resistance in school life
''Because nobody likes Chinese girls'': Intersecting identities and emotional
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DOI: 10.1177/0907568214549080
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“Because nobody likes Chinese
girls”: Intersecting identities
and emotional experiences of
subordination and resistance
in school life
Hanne Haavind
University of Oslo, Norway
Barrie Thorne
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Wendy Hollway
Open University, UK
Eva Magnusson
Umeå University, Sweden
Abstract
How do emotions enter into children’s negotiated understandings and situated uses of
categories of identity? This question guided a revisit to an ethnographic study of a multi-cultural
context in Oakland, California. A focus group discussion among four Chinese American girls
just graduating from elementary school and an interviewer, also Chinese American, was chosen
for closer study. This secondary analysis focuses on how the girls engaged in school events
and how in the interview they shared experiences of being excluded and rejected by peers.
Thus, both reports about life in school and lived life in the group discussion were analyzed in
ways that followed the girls’ individual and collective emotional dynamics. Emotional tension
between using and being used by categories drove their stories about belonging, exclusion
and subordination, and resistance. The girls’ handling of social identities in relation to language
use, required activities, and girly appearance in school demonstrated how they were able to
draw on an eclectic and intersecting mix of categories. In the containing setting of the focus
Corresponding author:
Hanne Haavind, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1094, Blindern, N-0317 Oslo,
Norway.
Email: hanne.haavind@psykologi.uio.no
549080CHD0010.1177/0907568214549080ChildhoodHaavind et al.
research-article2014
Article
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2 Childhood
group, the girls processed their raw emotional experience of being taunted and humiliated.
In the process they could challenge and destabilize the meanings attached to the categories
of identity used against them. Therefore, intersectional analyses cannot take any specific
meanings of social categories such as gender, ethnicity/race, and age, as the starting points.
Rather, in each specific instance, the meanings of social categories will emerge as the results
of the analysis.
Keywords
Categories of identity, children and youth, emotional experience, focus group, gender,
intersectionality, racial-ethnic categories, school life
During the summer after their graduation from a public elementary school in Oakland,
California, four girls, ages 11–12, participated in a lengthy focus group discussion. In
their multicultural school, the girls had been marked and set apart as “the Chinese girls,”
a term they also used for themselves. Eva Lam, the interviewer, had been an ethnogra-
pher in the girls’ classroom and, like the girls, spoke both Cantonese and English. She
invited the girls to share their thoughts and feelings about the previous year and about
their impending move to middle school. Their talk moved from one episode to another,
exploring patterns of belonging and exclusion. The lively and flowing conversation of
the focus group was eased by their familiarity with one another. The girls evoked a world
of taunts, teases, humiliation, and subordination, showing, as one of them repeatedly
concluded, that “nobody likes Chinese girls.”
This focus group transcript provided an empirical window into some little-examined
aspects of school life: the ways in which identity work is carried out by collective actions
among children, and how children make sense of their experiences and share emotions
as they negotiate categories of identity.
The increase in field-based studies of children’s participation in multi-ethnic schools
from the early 1990s was a consequence of contemporary processes of global migration.
In North America and Western Europe, ethnographies and qualitative interviews drew
attention to how children and young people handled new ethnic, economic and linguistic
differences (see, for example, Clandinin et al., 2006; Connolly, 2002; Evaldsson, 2005;
Goodwin, 2006). These results challenged the notion of unified and consistent identities
not just among children named as minority or immigrant, but also among the unmarked
category of majority and permanently resident children (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000).
The plea from the new sociology of childhood to study children as actors added value to
descriptive studies of children’s own experiences in a variety of societal conditions
(James and Prout, 1997). Concepts like positioning and subjectification theorized what
may have been adaptations to the new realities of fluid identities (Hauge, 2009; Staunæs,
2005), and the concept of intersectionality illuminated the ways in which children were
evoking available categories of identity and belonging. Children were drawing on and
redefining racial-ethnic categories as well as gender and sexuality, and combining them
with the transitional category of age (Frosh et al., 2002; Goodwin and Goodwin, 2000;
Haavind, 2014; Phoenix, 2006).
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Haavind et al. 3
The success of such conceptual generalizations from the first wave of studies opened
up questions for subsequent research. The earlier notion of the general child was given
complexity and specificity through findings that emphasized the agency of young peo-
ple, for example, in ascribing fluidity to their preferences and lifestyles. However, it is
worth taking another look at how recognition and contestation are created. Is more speci-
ficity needed in understanding experiences of inclusion and exclusion across different
social settings?
We aimed to take the Chinese girls’ case as not just about their actual handling of
changing configurations of difference, but also in relation to similar changes which chil-
dren might have to handle elsewhere. We used the context of available studies of children
and school life as a frame of reference, seeking to reinstall some aspects of personhood
and emotional engagement without leaving the insights of diversity and fluidity behind.
We selected this focus group in order to do a secondary analysis of relevant data from the
period—the 1990s—when studies of children’s everyday life in the setting of multicul-
tural schools took off. The presence in our data analytic group of Barrie Thorne, then the
principal investigator, ensured our familiarity with that study (Thorne, 2005, 2008). Our
aim in revisiting the data was to understand culture and public life from the vantage point
of the girls as participants, in conjunction with their personal trajectories of develop-
ment. Early on we were struck by the double layer of emotional processing evidenced in
the girls’ conversation.
On one hand, their experiences of social identity categories, tied to group divisions
and hierarchies in school, were stacked with painful emotional references, while on the
other, in the here and now of the focus group, they could enjoy the support of the group
and create a more pleasurable narrative. With children’s interactions and understandings
as our focus, we provide an experience-near approach to the study of “intersectionality,”
or the ways in which multiple categories of difference and inequality cut across and
inflect one another (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991; Staunæs, 2003).
Changing configurations of difference in Oakdale School
The racial-ethnic composition of “Oakdale School” had changed enormously since the
1950s, when White students predominated. White, middle-class flight from the city’s
public schools gained momentum after court-ordered racial desegregation in the 1960s.
By the late 1990s, fewer than 10% of Oakdale students were officially categorized as
White, and almost half were African American. Several decades of extensive immigra-
tion turned the school into a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1991) where children from many
different cultural and linguistic backgrounds converged, interacted, and worked to make
sense of one another (Thorne, 2008). Nearly all of the students, including the “Chinese
girls,” were fluent in oral English.
These demographic shifts had altered the local “field of available differences”
(Thorne, 2005) that is, the array of visible signs (such as physical appearance, modes of
speech, names, styles of clothing) that might be turned into “a difference that makes a
difference” (Bateson, 1972; Thorne, 1993) in the daily lives of children in the school.
Such cultural trends correspond to findings from many similar studies in the same period
and across North America and Western Europe. In this, as in other public schools, age,
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4 Childhood
gender, and a pre-designated array of racial-ethnic categories were embedded in official
institutional practices of naming and sorting. In these schools, the demographic composi-
tion had not settled into stable cultural practices that could be embraced by the children.
Their patterns of association involved shifting lines of gender and racial-ethnic and lin-
guistic separation, but also a fair degree of mixing. If they spoke a language other than
English at home, students from immigrant families were often placed in “sheltered”
rather than “regular” classes. Such placements inevitably influenced children’s choreog-
raphy of differences.
This was the case with our four informants. They all came from relatively low-income
Cantonese-speaking families who had migrated to the United States from China, Hong
Kong, or Vietnam. Two of the girls “Kim” and “Janet” were born abroad; “Jessica” and
“Sharon,” who were sisters, were born in the United States. How did the so-called
“Chinese girls” fit into the school context? That question animates the stories the girls
told during the interview. The girls’ dual self-identification as Chinese and girls fit with
our aim to explore what people do with categories of identity, and, in particular, the emo-
tions that get evoked and may shift from settings—like in school—where these catego-
ries often signify diversity and conflict, to settings—like the focus group—where they
could signify unity and belonging. Invited by the interviewer to use either language, the
girls took the opportunity to share with each other and with her what they were up against
and what they were trying to accomplish (Haavind, 2007).
Searching for the emotional connections between
collective and personal life
We started our review of the data with an open search for hints to salient identity mark-
ers, using categories of identity as sensitizing devices that could tell us where and how to
search, though not what to find. By paying attention to how the girls explored different
categories of persons, activities, and artifacts, we aimed to create an analytic approach
that encompassed discursive and psychosocial theoretical orientations. We shared the
tenet that identity work is saturated with emotional expression, which is communicated
interpersonally. In following how the girls staged and used their experiences, we could
both observe and vicariously experience how they perceived and worked through
valences of difference, similarity, and power.
The concepts of emotion and emotional experience pose both theoretical and meth-
odological challenges. Working together as secondary analysts, we could attend
closely to the contours of emotion, drawing upon somewhat different theoretical tra-
ditions. Each of us could launch interpretations of what was at stake in the emotional
sense, drawing on notions of emotion coming out of psychological as well as socio-
logical traditions. We considered how emotional forces are culturally processed and
scripted in events, as well as evoked in subjects, and thus how these forces are central
to both individual and group meaning making (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2000;
Hochschild, 1983; Tomkins, 1995). We could draw on the British psychosocial tradi-
tion (Blackman and Cromby, 2007; Blackman and Venn, 2010; Sclater et al., 2009),
whether phrased as affect or emotion, which conceptualizes emotional experience as
a dynamic embodied flow which inhabits and vitalizes meaning making, but is not
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Haavind et al. 5
necessarily or completely captured in language or talk. The British psychoanalyst
Wilfred Bion (1962) conceptualized emotional experience as the basic stuff of the
human relation to lived encounters and paid attention to if and how it could be thought.
Qualitative researchers have created a way of using their emotional responses in the
research encounter, not only in the field but during data analysis (Hollway and
Jefferson, 2013). As a methodology, this helps researchers become aware of emo-
tional currents that might otherwise remain hidden and compromise the recognition of
manifestations of emotion in participants’ talk (Clarke and Hoggett, 2009; Urwin,
2012). In our group, working with data that had “traveled” far from its origins
(Thomson et al., 2012), awareness of our emotional engagement with the girls, and
our articulation of this in the group helped us to follow through our intention to focus
on the role of emotions in their changing identifications as “Chinese girls.”
The analytic procedure began with reading segments of the interview aloud in our
group while attending to our emotional responses and sharing and discussing their pos-
sible meanings. We followed the ways in which the uses of identity categories evoked
emotionsin us as well as the girlsrelated to belonging and exclusion. In this inductive
approach to processes of categorization, we were looking for when, and how, particular
categories were invoked, and how they inflected one another in the girls’ narratives of
differences leading to dominance and resistance.
We identified three nodes of story-telling in which the themes of our analysis came
into rich empirical focus: the girls’ practice of switching between English and Cantonese
when they talked to one another in school, their experiences of participating in the games
of baseball required by the physical education curriculum, and dramas that revolved
around issues of appearance and consumption. As they talked about each of these
domains, the girls told stories of rejection based in categories that served either subordi-
nation or resistance. We will discuss their uses of intersecting categories, with particular
attention to the emotional tensions between using identity categories and being “used
by” them (Edley, 2001; Magnusson and Marecek, 2012). These tensions helped propel
the girls’ efforts to envision middle school as a future time and place when meanings
might shift so that a “Chinese girl” could become “cool.”
Speaking a different language
Oakdale, like other US elementary schools, organized classrooms by age and loosely by
gender, and formally sorted by ethnicity only if it correlated with the inability to speak or
read English. The children, however, drew on an eclectic array of categories involving
not only age, gender, and particular lines of racialized ethnicity (all bound up in “Chinese
girls”), but also more homegrown kinds of difference, such as wearing “cool” or “geeky”
shoes and being “good” or “bad” at baseball or at the back and forth of teasing (similarly,
see Evaldsson, 2005; Evaldsson and Corsaro, 1998).
At least a third of the students in their classroom spoke a language other than English
at home, but only the “Chinese girls” frequently spoke “their” language together at
school. When the interviewer asked the girls about switching between English and
Chinese, they began to discuss their uses of language to create distinctions from others
as well as connections between themselves. Jessica said,
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6 Childhood
Yeah, we usually, like, sometimes we get, like, get into a fight with some boys, any other people
who have English, we be talking in Chinese to them [other girls giggle], and they get very
steamed because they don’t know what we’re talking about. […] and they start getting mad,
because we usually talk Chinese …
As the girls giggle about instigating fights with boys and others who couldn’t understand or
speak Chinese, they share emotional tension fueled by their challenge of the prevailing dom-
inance of those who “have English.” They talk about other children as those who “don’t
know” their language and what they were talking about. The allusion to “a fight with some
boys” brings a gender dimension to this tension between “Chinese” and “English,” while
also positioning the girls as willing to instigate instead of shying away from conflict.
The ethnographers observed that when the girls talked with one another in everyday
school life, they moved between English and Cantonese, as Jessica describes,
When we see each other, like, Chinese people, we don’t, we see other people and we say
English, right? But when we see these, these people right here, we know that we know English,
right? And Chinese, so sometimes we talk in English, and we know each other well, and then
we start talking and talking. And then, like, when we see each other, we just talk Chinese,
because we don’t want anybody to hear, because usually they don’t want to know about us.
“Seeing” each other as “Chinese people,” they talk together in their shared language in
an uncensored and engaged way, giving a particular flavor to the fights with those “who
don’t understand.” However, the “we” the girls created and affirmed gets turned around
and othered when “some people” referred to their being Chinese. Jessica continued,
… And last time, when we were around some people and we talk Chinese, and they say we’re
Chinese and talk weird, and they be always saying “talk English,” and “we don’t want somebody
to speak Cantonese,” or “you have to,” just screamed at us as usual.
This attempted insistence that they “talk English,” which ruled in the school context, put
the girls in a difficult position. Using their language might evoke derogatory comments
from others, but it also expressed their solidarity, and their determination to hang on to
“what we have.”
This excerpt is the first place in the interview where the girls refer to screaming: “just
screamed at us as usual.” Screaming reenters the interview later, evoking the categorical
boundary between themselves and others, and animating, in a safe place, the pleasures of
sharing their anger and rejection of such insulting practices.
Playing baseball as required
The girls repeatedly worked with emotional tensions between giving in to and resisting
attempted subordination by a shifting constellation of “people who don’t like us.” Such
tensions also emerged during participatory school activities, such as compulsory base-
ball, which the “Chinese girls” experienced not as inclusive, but as distinctively
“American” and masculine. Boys of different racial-ethnicities often created ties with
one another through playing team sports. Many girls in the school, the Chinese girls in
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Haavind et al. 7
particular, did not see baseball as a domain they wanted to master. However, because
they needed the grade, they had to participate in baseball and endure the painful drama
of ranking:
Jessica: Whenever we play baseball or something, like, boys be captains, and
they tell us to choose, boys and girls mixed together, we’re always the
last ones to be chosen, because nobody likes Chinese girls.
Kim: And when we missed the ball and we’re out, and they’ll say “heh, you
don’t know how to play.”
Janet: They are racist. For example, when we miss the ball in a game, they’ll
say “hit it, hit it, hit it, you stupid,” and keep yelling at us.
Interviewer: Are “they” the boys?
Janet: And there are other girls too. They keep saying, “that’s a good throw,
hit it, hit it, hit it” even when it’s really not. That’s racism.
Sharon: I feel frustration.
Jessica: It’s like, the Blacks, they’re really fierce, and I’m not saying all Blacks
are like this, only some of them are bad people. So, the Blacks, and
they are really fierce, they yell at you when you miss the ball, they
yell at you, and when they run out of things to say, they’ll start saying
bad things about our clothes, our hair, and we shouldn’t be in the
school, those kinds of things. And so, whenever there are two black
people, and we are choosing our teams, usually it’s the fat people, and
the Chinese and Mexicans would stand on the side, and the other peo-
ple, like those who know how to play and the tall ones are chosen.
Janet here moves the attention from the specific suffering “because nobody likes Chinese
girls,” to a more general charge—“they are racist,” thus generalizing to a politicized
discourse.
As the girls sort out patterns of inclusion and exclusion, they oscillate between a
highly contextual use and combination of social categories and a more general political
discourse about racism and tolerance. As they explore and share experiences in the seclu-
sion of this group, Jessica shows her awareness that she might be evincing racism herself
when she says “blacks are fierce.” After quickly qualifying her accusation, she cannot
refrain from creating an emotional revenge by such a coupling of labels. The revenge
draws on a subjective accretion of events, and the emotional impact of being yelled at:
feeling insecure, angry, and stuck. Jessica concludes—on behalf of all of them—that
they share this subordinated position with two other marginalized and unattractive cate-
gories, “fat people” and “Mexicans.” The girls frame the story with a motley, locally situ-
ated array of categories that includes, but goes beyond, the lists used by social scientists
who analyze intersectionality (most often gender, race, ethnicity, and social class).
Girly appearance and consumption
Throughout the interview, the Chinese girls expressed concern about how they appeared to
others. If someone says “look at her” about one of them, danger is sure to follow. Repeatedly
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8 Childhood
the girls observed that whenever “they” run out of things to say, they’ll start “yelling” bad
things about the Chinese girls’ clothes, shoes, hair, and sheer presence in school.
Janet takes the lead in telling a story about an encounter where Sheila (a member of
their group, not present in the interview) was the target of insults:
The time we had a class picture, and Sheila had short hair, cause she had a haircut, and then
when the picture was out, they were showing everybody Sheila’s picture and said “look at this,
look at this,” making fun of her.
The girls take turns adding examples that fit with the idea that some gazes and comments
from other kids in the school are insulting, from having a baby-like face to trying to show
off when wearing expensive shoes. When such examples are tied together in a row, they
could appear to instigate more and more suffering. Rather, such repetition in the here and
now of the focus group seems to foster companionship. Their emotions get closer to
anger, fueling their resistance. The gaze of the other that could put them down was grad-
ually drawing them together so that “they” may appear as greatly mistaken.
At the end of this sequence, Janet returns to an occasion when she spoke out, well
aware that this would lead to put downs:
Last time we did something, looked up what kinds of shoes people wear. And the black people
and white people said they wore Nikes and other big name shoes. And when they gave me the
paper to check off the kinds of shoes I wear, I checked off the ones that are not very well-known
but are pretty good ones, and they made fun of us and said we are stupid for buying those shoes,
and how we have no money.
While being a record of suffering, this account identifies courage and strength not to give
in. Janet concludes that “it is all crazy and stupid, it’s none of their business what kinds
of shoes I wear,” whereupon the girls laugh out loud together. In the oscillation between
suffering and anger that fuels their shared resistance, Jessica talks about a particular
“them,” which she calls “the Black point of view”:
Jessica: They don’t think that we actually have respect as far as them. Maybe
they’re just jealous or something, just let them be like that, and don’t try to
understand it, because just because they don’t respect us doesn’t mean that
we’re not as cool and as better as them…
Sharon: It’s very difficult for us.
When the girls turn their suffering around into a claim for more sympathy and respect,
it is coming out of the safe, containing context guided by the interviewer. They are able
to think together and make some sense of painful emotional experiences (Ogden, 2008).
This setting enables them to name and resist the critical gaze of others.
Using and being used by categories
While often using an unspecified “they” or talking about “Blacks” (especially “Black
boys”), later they describe being excluded by some “cool girls.” The use of “they” moves
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Haavind et al. 9
between different categorical positions as the “Chinese girls” describe being shunted
between low-status categories (“speak Chinese,” “don’t belong here,” “bad at baseball,”
“geeky,” “wear cheap funny shoes,” “not cool,” “fake,” “cheat”). The field of available
differences in their daily school surroundings contained more risks to be disliked than
opportunities to be accepted.
Sometimes a categorization is reaffirmed and solidified through a process that Ian
Hacking (1995) calls “the looping effects of human kinds” (Magnusson and Marecek,
2012). In the interview, the girls struggle with particular loops. For example, wearing the
“right” kind of shoes didn’t make them cool in the way it did for others, because
the category “Chinese girls” was incommensurate with “cool.” Despite their grievances,
the girls seemed to find respite in being “we,” specifically in their ability to speak a
shared language and get good grades. This set them apart as privileged, and gave them a
reason to seek revenge and to categorize others as “stupid.”
The handling of this continuous tension between “using” and being “used by” catego-
ries gives force to the girls’ narratives (Edley, 2001): the emotional experience of rejec-
tion helps propel their active use of categories to redeem themselves, something they
were closer to in the safe context of the focus group. The girls were able to laugh when
they thought back on some of the teasing, while also feeling affronted and hurt by the
rejections. They reflected on what was fair, drawing on cultural discourses about fighting
racism to turn hurt into anger. In the following passage, the girls complain that in the eyes
of others, being “Chinese girls” outweighs distinctions among them. Jessica begins this
passage by quoting Alex, a Black boy in their class, who said to her,
… how come Chinese people be all wearing pointy shoes? Look at all the Chinese people, you
put a whole class of Chinese people together [Girls laugh], they all gonna have pointed shoes’.
[Girls laugh again and interviewer asks for more explanation. Jessica replies] Yeah, whenever
we have something, they think that other Chinese people is the same as us. So, if they see us
wearing, like twins, or, whenever they see, like pretending we’re wearing the same kind of
shoes, like she’s wearing a tennis shoe, and she’s wearing a tennis shoe, and she’s wearing a
tennis shoe, and I’m wearing a tennis shoe, and Sheila is wearing a tennis shoe, that’s all
different colors, they start thinking that Chinese people is all wearing tennis shoes …
Again, it is the company of the other girls that enables Jessica to do a “folk” analysis of
the social relations among sixth graders by working out the ways in which divisions of
gender, racial-ethnicity, social class—and “cool/not cool,” “smart/stupid,” “ugly/
pretty”—cut across and shape one another:
Usually English boys fit in with Chinese boys, or any, any other culture boys because they are
part of the manhood, and we, but the only problem is that Chinese girls doesn’t fit in with other
English girls is because, English girls are, like, fashionable and stuff, and fashion and rich and
stuff. And do you know why the Chinese boys can fit in with Mexican and any other culture,
like, fit in with, um, people that is English, is because, they are boys, all they think about is,
fighting, violence, and name calling … … And then girls, they don’t, they belong in groups,
boys belong to the whole group, but girls belong in this group, this group, this group, this group
… … we don’t go together because, um, some are cool, girls are, like, some are cool, some are
smart, some are stupid, some are ugly, some are pretty.
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10 Childhood
The dominant “we” tone of the interview makes clear that the girls shared a troubled
position in the social landscape of the school, and they worked together to escape their
subordination. However, we also found differences between them in how they envi-
sioned ways to surpass the distinctions that ruled in their school. With the transition to
middle school on her mind, Jessica, the oldest and in many ways the leader of the group,
worked intensely to find a different trajectory. She tried to figure out how to become
more “cool,” an ambition infused with both desire and fear.
The push and pull of emotional ambivalence often drives the making of meaning, as
individuals and groups attempt to process raw emotional experience (Bion, 1962; Ogden,
2008). However, the exploratory thinking required to process experience varies accord-
ing to the extent to which painful and frustrating emotions can be faced. If this is success-
ful, the imaginative thinking required to go beyond being used by categories and to use
them creatively constitutes a kind of everyday agency. The following example demon-
strates this agentic thinking in action and takes a step beyond establishing that emotion
is present in category use to illustrate how emotional changes underpin the way catego-
ries are used in meaning making.
Can a “Chinese girl” be “cool”?
The anger at humiliation is palpable in the following excerpt, which comes after Jessica
tells a story about being excluded from a group of “cool” girls after she failed a “test” of
entry that involved getting the right answer to how long one should spend brushing one’s
hair. She realized that the test was a fraud; whatever time she and the other Chinese girls
said they used in hair brushing would be deemed incorrect. As she told this story, Jessica
voiced a challenge to the “cool” girls:
… yeah, and then we, we usually say to them that, you’re not fair, and do you know that this
can really destroy your life because you never give us, the Chinese people, a chance, and we,
however, in the future whenever we get to be cool or something, and you try to get into our
group, we won’t let you in because you treat us this way, and we will never forgive you guys.
Jessica passionately expresses what she would like to have said on that occasion. She
also expresses more general feelings of being maltreated on racist grounds and wanting
the “cool” girls to recognize the extent of the hurt they are causing. This anger motivates
Jessica to imagine a future when the tables are turned. The idea that then her group won’t
let them in may afford Jessica (and her group) at least fleeting satisfaction. But she
returns to the specific event and describes the “cool” girls’ reactions—they “walk away,”
“didn’t care,” “didn’t listen.” The tone shifts from triumph to dismay, reflecting a change
from the retaliatory fantasy of control to the reality of the failure of her agency in the
actual situation. She is able to recognize the latter, which puts her back in touch with the
more mundane but painful reality.
Jessica’s retaliation fantasy sharply splits the categories of us and them, distinguish-
ing two groups of girls—good and bad. She idealizes the Chinese girls (or “Chinese
people”) as good victims, and positions the others as bad racists. A simple reversal of
this distinction allows her to project her own group as exclusionary in the future. Alford
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Haavind et al. 11
(1989) links this process of splitting to the concept of instrumental reason, which
“forces reality into categories that define objects in terms of how they may be best
manipulated or controlled” (p. 139). Splitting requires and reproduces categories suit-
able for boundary-producing thought.
Alford (1989) contrasts instrumental reason with reparative reason, informed by a
stance of care and involving “concern for the object qua object that allows us to know it
better, letting the object create its own categories,” as we see in action when Jessica
explores her own situation through the example of Mike, a Chinese boy her age (p. 152).
She thinks about their liminal positions and how the categories “Chinese” and “girl/boy”
articulate in practice, using categories in a reparative rather than instrumental way, fitting
them to the complexities she now has in mind:
Jessica: … Mike is like a bad boy or something. If we [girls] be bad, Chinese
people are just standing there right away. But we’re not bad, we are
like all goody and stuff [laughs, other girls laugh too].
Interviewer: You mean, in terms of your grades and stuff.
Jessica: Mike doesn’t [implied “get good grades”], always gets F’s, and always
goofs around in class, and everybody always tease him and stuff, and
he doesn’t care, but whenever they tease Sheila or any of us, we start
crying, and they be saying, we, we’re just teasing, you guys just can’t
take a joke, but Mike can take a joke and stuff, and usually Mike is the
one who goofs around, and whenever we say something in Chinese
about, those boys are very mean, and then Mike be saying, well, you
are mean too.
Jessica deploys the category “bad boy” to explain his difference from the Chinese girls.
Then she notes another way in which Mike differs: when teased, he can take it, he doesn’t
care. She also recognizes the ambivalence of his situation. Although he is Chinese like
them, he is also different from them, and sometimes teases and opposes them. Knowing
Cantonese, he can report back to the other boys when the girls say mean things. Mike
actually threatens them: “I’m gonna tell every single thing back to the boys if you say
something about us.” This shows that he identifies with his gender group (which the girls
consider to be “bad boys,” mostly Black) if his loyalties are put to a test. Given that Mike
is one of the boys who teases them and makes them cry, Jessica is surprisingly nonjudg-
mental about Mike’s allegiance:
Interviewer: from what you said, Mike feels like he belongs more to that group
[Jessica: yeah], instead of seeing himself as a Chinese, is that what you..
Jessica: No, he likes being Chinese [Interviewer: okay], all he does is he just
wants to fit in more with the school, because [Interviewer: with the
school, in general], because there is not a lot of Chinese boys. There
are a lot of Chinese boys, but then they’re usually in the lower grades.
And then, he’s like, he’s just the fewer boys in the upper grades, so, he
trying to make friends, but then […] Mike just think that he can’t fit in
with other Chinese boys, because they’re geeky, or either they are
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12 Childhood
skinny or fat or something. So, Mike just like to hang out with Alex.
You know, they just start being friends when they both, you know, they
have the same, they almost have the same personality. He likes some-
body that has the same attitude as him, because Alex, like, he’s mean
really and have bad grades, and Mike has just the same pattern as him.
[Interviewer: I see] And they start being friends.
To make sense of Mike’s patterns of allegiance and his reluctance to identify as
Chinese, Jessica goes beyond the available categories of identity. She initially reaches
for the label “bad boy” and its dissonance, in practice, with being Chinese. The inter-
viewer articulates the incommensurability of these categories. But Jessica moves in a
more nuanced direction, explaining imaginatively and realistically that Mike hangs
out with Alex (a “bad” Black boy) because of the unavailability of Chinese boys with
whom he can “fit in.” She seems to identify with Mike’s wish to fit in. His trajectory
unsettles the logic that if you are Chinese, you can’t be cool. Mike can’t deny being,
in various identifiable ways, “Chinese,” but he can mute and alter that identity by
hanging out with Alex and by never speaking Cantonese in school. When Jessica
voices him in reported speech, claiming that he “knows Chinese,” not that he “is
Chinese,” she seems to be making this fine distinction. This helps her imagine finding
a different relation to her own Chinese identity, which would enable her to be part of
a cool group.
Jessica deploys social identity categories to do emotional work and uses their power
in two different ways. In describing rejection by the “cool girls,” categories help her
establish boundaries between good and bad people and protect herself (and her Chinese-
ness) from the suffering of being excluded. But in the case of Mike, with whom she
partially identifies, she uses the same set of categories in more creative ways, “letting the
object (Mike, as he exists in her imagination) create its own categories” (Alford, 1989:
152). She modifies, refines, and nuances the category “Chinese” as she accounts for
Mike’s choice to hang out with a Black, “bad,” and “cool” boy: she uses them, rather
than being used by them. In this mode of thinking, boundaries around categories become
more porous.
Discussion
Evidently, processes of categorization figure centrally in the girls’ worlds, but it would
not be fair to claim that they were “doing intersectionality” as researchers do when
they pay attention to an array of categories in a systematic and reflective way (Choo
and Ferree, 2010). The girls’ “folk” approach was on-the-ground, from-the-inside, and
generated from their shared and often marginalized social position. We resisted taking
the impact of any social category for granted. Instead, we looked for how categories
that allude to people’s identities (actual and imagined) get deployed and evoke emo-
tions (Hollway and Froggett, 2012). As the girls grew up and made their way in a
specific context; we learned about their efforts to make some categories gain force in
the world. Social categories are imbued with not only relations of power, but also pow-
erful emotions.
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Haavind et al. 13
When interviewed separately, a child may be able to talk beyond some of the identity
categories that are imposed on them and claim instead to be “just themselves” (Moinian,
2009). When children in groups are creating a “we” based on some available categories
of identity like “the Chinese girls,” they may both lend themselves to othering and create
their own modes of resistance. Just like other children in multicultural schools, they
would get stuck on some social occasions and act and think transformatively about ongo-
ing processes of social inclusion and exclusion on other occasions (Staunæs, 2003). In
the focus group, the girls demonstrated that identity work can be relational, and that their
capacity to imagine future times and places could offer them new opportunities (Hollway,
2011). Together in a containing setting, the girls processed the raw emotional experience
of their tauntings and humiliations and in the process could challenge and destabilize the
meanings attached to the categories of identity used against them, even to the point of not
simply indulging in a vengeful reversal.
The combination of ethnography and focus group gave access to the double herme-
neutics of how the girls engaged in school events and how they shared these experiences
in the interview. The emotional tensions following from participation in these two social
settings turned out to be driving forces for open-ended trajectories of thinking and action.
We have demonstrated how collective forms of social life like language use (their use of
Cantonese in school), social activities (compulsory inclusion in baseball games), and
appearance (their clothing in particular) were transformed and shaped by personal
engagement in ongoing negotiations about identity issues. Thus, the meanings that get
attached to social categories like ethnicity and gender and age cannot be taken as the
starting point for intersectionality analysis, but will rather emerge as the result (Sedano,
2012). For example, in Goodwin’s study of girls’ participation in games, the girls cut
across all other distinctions that could otherwise separate them, and by doing so they
were able to launch a unified rejection of baseball as a male thing (Goodwin, 2006). In
Oakdale school, baseball prevailed as American integration, making good and poor
players.
We found the focus group interview to be more than a source of experiences from the
school setting; rather, it gave access to a section of lived life played out in the here and
now. We were the “observers” of emotional tensions and oscillations as the girls played
them out in the group, and in our group of secondary analysts, we were able to share our
various emotional responses and reflect upon them (Hollway and Jefferson, 2013).
Using and being used by categories is not a matter of either/or. Rather, these oscillat-
ing dynamics in the group were connected and a prerequisite for subjects working on
transformation and change. When the girls described their own active participation in
marking themselves into a set-apart group, they reacted to and may have confirmedthe
ways in which some other children saw them and treated them as “all the same.” From
their shared aspects of identity, they built collectivity and solidarity, but the price was to
be on the receiving end of taunts and yells.
In their rejection stories, they were positioned as beyond the empathy of others.
Access to being one of the cool girls appeared both attractive and inaccessible. Together,
they were able to joke about this, and show their aggression in indirect ways by steaming
people up or by creating revenge fantasies. Following emotional dynamics across social
settings of participation helped us understand the ways in which categories of identity do
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14 Childhood
not just include or marginalize people according to how they identify themselves or get
marked by others. Rather, emotions evoked in ongoing events fuel subsequent use of
categories and can help to change them, as we saw in the containing setting of the focus
group, Jessica, in particular, develops the ability to move from instrumental reasoning to
reparative reasoning.
Within the group, ongoing exchange of the relevance of different categorical markers
opened intense sharing of affects that could not be expressed at school. The transforma-
tive category of developing and growing older by age was also evoked in two ways: one
is the format of talking about the year that has passed and envisioning the year to come,
another is that the interviewer presumably has been what they are—a Chinese girl grow-
ing up in a multicultural school in California. A Chinese girl is definitely not cool in the
present, but she might be in a not too far future. One of the girls is taking the lead in this
imagined move, but she still depends on being “one of them” when she dares to think
about it—and perhaps further to make it happen (Gulbrandsen, 2003).
Acknowledgements
This secondary analysis emerged from a cross-disciplinary project: Personal Development and
Socio-Cultural Change, organized by Hanne Haavind and Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen at the Centre
for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. During a full year (2010–
2011), a larger group of researchers from psychology and related disciplines came together to do
secondary analysis, focusing on segments of data from earlier empirical studies relevant to the
larger theme. Working together in smaller groups, they highlighted questions about the ways in
which emotion is encoded in and interpreted from qualitative data. Our group of researchers spent
6 weeks together and selected the focus group interview that became the focus of our interpretive
work. We thank Anita Moe, the fifth member of our group. We also thank Eva Lam, the field
worker, who conducted and transcribed the focus group interview with the “Chinese girls”.
Funding
Data gathering in Oakdale School was funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on
Successful Pathways Through Middle Childhood in a grant to Barrie Thorne. The seconday analy-
sis was funded by the Centre for Advanced Study in a grant to Hanne Haavind and Harriet Bjerrum
Nielsen.
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